Industrial management, as a field of Commerce & business administration, studies the structure and organization of industrial companies. It comprises those fields of business administration that are necessary for the success of companies within the manufacturing sector and the encompassing services (primarily operations management, marketing, and financial management).
Graduate programs in management draw on Sloan's idea and provide engineers with a strategic management education with a focus on production management, marketing, financial management, human resources as well as commercial law – supplemented by corporate governance, corporate social responsibility and sustainability topics. The primary goal is to enable students and professionals to take a holistic approach to industry management.
Most graduate studies in industrial management are full-time MBA degree programs that, in addition to a preferably engineering bachelor's degree, also require several years of professional experience. In general, students spend the first year of their degree acquiring both a working knowledge of management functions and the analytical skills needed to practice them. After the second year, students usually seek internships and pursue elective courses, which often go towards a specialization in their master's thesis.
Study programs in industrial management are very popular in economies with a high value of manufacturing output, such as the United States and Germany. Especially German research universities incorporate a large number of advanced courses in engineering in their graduate program in industrial management and are, thus, more like M.Eng.- programs. On the other hand, U.S. universities and universities of applied sciences in Germany offer MBA programs in industrial management that follow more the original idea of Sloan and emphasize hands-on application of theory.